The Big Bottle Wine Festival

The Big Bottle Wine Festival is a weekend-long celebration of wine-tasting and food-pairing at the beautiful Cellars-Hohenort in Constantia. The festival officially starts this evening with an exclusive champagne tasting and 5-course dinner and then continue with ‘Walk-About’ tastings (both wine and food) throughout the weekend (24, 25 August 2013).

So why ‘Big Bottle’?

All wines will be poured from big bottles during the Walk-About. These wine farms bottle in large formats, usually only for special occasions and limited releases, to showcase outstanding vintages either to mark a winery’s anniversary or for charitable purposes. These magnificent bottles are synonymous with celebration, extravagance, enjoyment and they invoke a feeling of delightful, social decadence. Some forty of South Africa’s top wine producers and importers pouring will be serving their best wines during this weekend.

I’m most interested in the food offerings, of course, and these look very promising indeed:

Spearheaded by award-winning executive chef, Peter Tempelhoff, from the Liz McGrath’s collection of hotels, the third annual Big Bottle Festival will showcase a panoply of culinary stars such as Edgar Osojnik head chef at Buitenverwachting, Rudi Liebenberg of the highly acclaimed Mount Nelson, Harald Bresselschmidt celebrated chef from Aubergine Restaurant, Roland Gorgosilich of Bosman’s Restaurant at the Grand Roche Hotel in Paarl, Gregory Czarnecki renowned for his work at the Waterkloof Estate and Brad Ball, Executive Chef of the world class Bistro Sixteen82 amongst others.

Yum.

At R400 a pop, tickets aren’t cheap, but if you consider the calibre of the food and wine on offer, as well as the stellar location, you can probably get your money’s worth if you have a discerning palate and go there curious and hungry (assuming the tasting portions are given generously, which I certainly hope is the case).

The Big Bottle Wine Festival runs from 23-25 August 2013 – with the Big Bottle Walk-About running from 3pm to 8pm on the Saturday, and 1pm to 6pm on the Sunday. Tickets are available via WebTickets.